Patrick Melrose is now a husband and father, but his family's dark past still stalks his present and threatens his hope for the future.
Edward St Aubyn was born in London in 1960. His superbly acclaimed Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006) and At Last. He is also the author of the novels A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge, Lost for Words and Dunbar.
The Melrose sequence is now clearly one of the major achievements
of contemporary British fiction. Stingingly well-written and
exhilaratingly funny
*Evening Standard*
Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation
*Alan Hollinghurst*
St Aubyn puts an entire family under a microscope, laying bare all
its painful, unavoidable complexities. At once epic and intimate,
appalling and comic, the novels are masterpieces, each and every
one
*Maggie O’Farrell*
St Aubyn’s prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious,
searching intellect. One of the finest writers of his
generation
*The Times*
Nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic
comedy of St Aubyn’s world – or more surprising – its philosophical
density
*Zadie Smith*
Humor, pathos, razor-sharp judgement, pain, joy and everything in
between. The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the 21st century,
by one of our greatest prose stylists
*Alice Sebold*
From the very first lines I was completely hooked . . . By turns
witty, moving and an intense social comedy, I wept at the end but
wouldn’t dream of giving away the totally unexpected reason
*Sunday Telegraph*
Blackly comic, superbly written fiction . . . His style is crisp
and light; his similes exhilarating in their accuracy . . . St
Aubyn writes with luminous tenderness of Patrick’s love for his
sons
*Sunday Telegraph*
I’ve loved Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. Read them all,
now
*David Nicholls*
Wonderful caustic wit . . . Perhaps the very sprightliness of the
prose – its lapidary concision and moral certitude – represents the
cure for which the characters yearn. So much good writing is in
itself a form of health
*Guardian*
Clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British
fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny
*Evening Standard*
Beautifully written, excruciatingly funny and also very tragic
*Sky Magazine*
The act of investigative self-repair has all along been the
underlying project of these extraordinary novels. It is the source
of their urgent emotional intensity, and the determining principle
of their construction. For all their brilliant social satire, they
are closer to the tight, ritualistic poetic drama of another era
than the expansive comic fiction of our own . . . A terrifying,
spectacularly entertaining saga
*Guardian*
His prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching
intellect. As a sketcher of character, his wit — whether turned
against pointless members of the aristocracy or hopeless crack
dealers — is ticklingly wicked. As an analyser of broken minds and
tired hearts he is as energetic, careful and creative as the
perfect shrink. And when it comes to spinning a good yarn, whether
over the grand scale or within a single page of anecdote, he has a
natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat
*The Times*
The Patrick Melrose novels can be read as the navigational charts
of a mariner desperate not to end up in the wretched harbor from
which he embarked on a voyage that has led in and out of heroin
addiction, alcoholism, marital infidelity and a range of behaviors
for which the term ‘self-destructive’ is the mildest of euphemisms.
Some of the most perceptive, elegantly written and hilarious novels
of our era. . . Remarkable
*New York Times*
St Aubyn conveys the chaos of emotion, the confusion of heightened
sensation, and the daunting contradictions of intellectual
endeavour with a force and subtlety that have an exhilarating,
almost therapeutic effect
*New York Review of Books*
A masterpiece. Edward St Aubyn is a writer of immense gifts
*Patrick McGrath*
Irony courses through these pages like adrenaline . . . Patrick’s
intelligence processes his predicaments into elegant, lucid,
dispassionate, near-aphoristic formulations . . . Brimming with
witty flair, sardonic perceptiveness and literary finesse
*Sunday Times*
A humane meditation on lives blighted by the sins of the previous
generation. St Aubyn remains among the cream of British
novelists
*Sunday Times*
The main joy of a St Aubyn novel is the exquisite clarity of his
prose, the almost uncanny sense he gives that, in language as in
mathematical formulae, precision and beauty invariably point to
truth . . . Characters in St Aubyn novels are hyper-articulate, and
the witty dialogue is here, as ever, one of the chief joys
*Financial Times*
One of the most amazing reading experiences I've had in a
decade
*LA Times*
The most brilliant British novelist writing today
*Stella*
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